Hitachi introduces AI technology that analyses issues subject to debate in Japanese

Hitachi issued a press release mentioning that it has developed a basic Artificial Intelligence technology that analyzes huge volumes of text data on issues that are subject to debate, and presents reasons and grounds for either affirmative or negative opinions on those issues in Japanese.

Hitachi said in a statement that the technology focuses on values which are considered essential to people and communities such as health, economics and public safety when expressing opinions. It uses correlations between those various values and relevant issues in the society to identify reasons and grounds with a high degree of reliability from among large volumes of news articles. By using multiple viewpoints, it is able to present reasons and grounds without bias toward a single perspective.

This is a basic technology that will contribute to artificial intelligence enabling logical dialogue between humans and computers. The technology could be applied to future systems to analyze contents of company documents, published reports or electronic medical records, in order to form opinions and generate data to support decision making.

In recent years, with the evolution of the Information and technology sector, attention has been attracted to technologies that analyze “Big Data” – which is generated every day by various sensors and POS systems – and identify valuable information. Also, there has been an increasing demand for effective use of data such as company documents, published reports and electronic medical records to help give additional value and make management decisions.

The AI system is presented with sentences which represent reasons and grounds extracted from thousands of articles. Learning from the rules and patterns, the system becomes discriminating of sentences which represent reasons and grounds in new articles.The technology developed will be core technology in achieving a multi-lingual AI system capable of offering opinion. Hitachi will pursue further research to realize AI systems supporting business decision making by enterprises worldwide.